Inland Empire (David Lynch)

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Inland Empire Blu-ray Studio Canal June 2023

Inland Empire Blu-ray

Inland Empire Blu-ray Review


David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006) has received a preliminary release date: April 19.

Andrew O'Hehir

How do we explain the unlikely cultural status of David Lynch? There is no hotter ticket at this year's New York Film Festival than the North American premiere of Lynch's new picture, "Inland Empire." I know two movie buffs in their early 20s who are planning to hang around outside Alice Tully Hall on Sunday night and buy tickets from scalpers (if they can find them), and they certainly won't be alone.

What will they see if they get in? An obsessive and surreal three-hour picture, almost totally lacking in conventional plot, shot on high-definition video by a 60-year-old director. You could say, I suppose, that "Inland Empire" is about an actress (played by Lynch favorite Laura Dern) in a Hollywood film that's been cursed by Gypsies. But that's like saying "Ulysses" is a story about a guy who sells newspaper ads, or, more to the point, that the dream you had where you flew over the Atlantic Ocean with your second-grade teacher and Marilyn Manson was about air travel.

Lynch's movies have always flirted with (or, to his detractors, wallowed in) dreamlike levels of abstraction and ambiguity, associative and reiterative images drawn from the unconscious, and other tropes that have more to do with experimental cinema and avant-garde art than with narrative drama. Would someone out there like to tell me what the plot of "Eraserhead" is, or to explain why understanding it is important to one's appreciation of the film, or lack thereof? By the time of "Blue Velvet" (released 20 years ago!), it seemed clear that conventional narrative, along with the audience expectation it builds, was an element that Lynch would sometimes use, sometimes subvert and sometimes ignore altogether.

Many of Lynch's fans apparently believe, however, that the director has set out for them a massive jigsaw puzzle that has a solution. Salon's famous "explainer" about Lynch's 2001 "Mulholland Drive" remains one of the most-clicked articles in our history; it's a brilliant but bizarrely pedantic piece, full of confident assertions that the film has a unitary narrative that mostly makes sense and mostly hangs together. I would argue that A) that's not true, and B) even more important, it's missing the point.

Lynch's movies are about his super-saturated colors and meticulous sound design; his characters' terrifying glimpses of the spectral, the demonic and the divine; his sense that movies render time into a porous and malleable medium; his troubled and troubling examinations of female sexuality as an image-commodity, and other things we could discuss. Are they also about their putative narrative plotlines? Sure, in the same way that Duchamp's "Large Glass" is about a bride and some bachelors, or "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" is about a dinner party.

I'm not going to review "Inland Empire" in any comprehensive way, not least because I'm not quite sure what to say. It has not yet been acquired for U.S. distribution (which ought to tell you something about it right there) and it seems unfair to review a film that probably won't be seen by American audiences until sometime next year. (It will be released in various European countries between November and March.)

If anyone wants to explain this one in terms of its plot, though, good luck to you. The inland empire of the title refers, in my judgment, not to the suburban hills and valleys southeast of Los Angeles but to the darker regions of the self. Nikki, the fading star played by Dern, must venture into her own inland empire -- and so, I think, does Lynch. Many of his trademark haunting, grotesque and comic images are captured here, in the smudgy, caffeine-edged luster of HD video (it's obvious why Lynch is attracted to the medium, but I miss the brilliance of his pictures on celluloid).

Minimal bones are thrown to the audience. Nikki has signed on to make an adulterous love story -- it looks like a terrible film, and I can't tell whether that's intentional -- with a bad-boy costar Devon (Justin Theroux), directed by a pompous Englishman named Kingsley (Jeremy Irons). None of these people sticks around for long, although Harry Dean Stanton almost steals the movie in his tiny role as Kingsley's debauched and broke assistant. The picture belongs entirely to Dern and to the director, as Nikki seems to walk through a mysterious portal out of her own privileged life and into that of her character, and then (perhaps) into yet another existence as a battered Hollywood streetwalker.

There's also the question of the Gypsy curse and the film's haunted prehistory, some fragments of a sinister thriller set in Poland (and spoken in Polish), an absurdist drawing-room comedy involving a family of giant rabbits wearing clothes (my colleague Stephanie Zacharek says they are not rabbits but donkeys, and who am I to insist on a single interpretation?) and lots and lots of ominous images of Dern/Nikki/whoever wandering through dark places: alleys, corridors, staircases, the streets of Lodz, Poland, and the corner of Hollywood and Vine. That's without mentioning the chorus of Hollywood hookers doing the Locomotion, or the dynamite musical number that unfolds behind the closing credits and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

To the extent that "Inland Empire" does offer a narrative, it's largely a downer, a story about a woman who is symbolically, and perhaps actually, debased. Don't expect to go home energized by Lynch's take on the movies, art and life here. Despite its moments of inspired terror and mystery, this isn't a cult hit in the making like "Mulholland Drive," or even a contrarian critic's delight like "Lost Highway." It's an opaque and baffling work, difficult to follow and difficult to like.

That said, this may be a necessary work for Lynch, if not exactly for his audience. "Inland Empire" does not mark a new direction. Reportedly written and shot on the fly, with neither director nor actors knowing exactly what would come next, it's a distillation of, and meditation upon, the themes that have possessed Lynch since at least "Blue Velvet" and seemed to come to climax, pun intended, with "Mulholland Drive." But Lynch's questions and obsessions are always big ones; there's nothing insincere or inauthentic about him. Good or bad, his films imitate no one else's, and serve as a constant rebuke to the parasitical industry that loves him but can't quite handle him.

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